painting paper hearts
by windofbanners
Summary: Captain America is a soldier. Steve Rogers is an artist. Five times he draws each of the Avengers and the one time he draws himself. Family!fic. No slash.
1. Natasha

A/N: Another five things fic...I seriously have issues. But this one had to be written because I think that Steve Rogers is literally like the adorablest (notaword) thing ever. Like, seriously. He's like a giant puppy...a chiseled, gorgeous, muscled puppy. And at the same time, he's one of saddest characters to me that has so much potential for expansion. He's like a child in this huge world that he's trying to make sense of, and hopefully through this piece, he'll find a way to find himself as he finds others that he loves.

No slash! And no Steve/Natasha pairing, the barest hints of Clint/Natasha if anything.

Enjoy the ride!

* * *

He ends up drawing her first.

It happens on a day that begins with nightmares. After Steve wakes up, gasping and sweating and chest heaving for air, he leaves his room to sit on the couch in the living room, hoping that his ghosts wouldn't be able to find him there. But they follow, and he wastes away the hours of early morning trying to still his trembling mind.

By the time the sky has turned a watery gray, he hears light footsteps padding towards him, growing louder and louder in volume. He already knows by the weight of the sound that the footsteps belong to Natasha, but he still turns his head and gives her a polite nod when she enters the room before returning to his thoughts. He traces a stain on the coffee table absentmindedly.

A soft touch startles him out of his musings and he looks up, surprised, to see Natasha looking at him probingly.

"Are you all right?" Her voice is brusque, but the hand on his shoulder is gentle, and he blinks for a long moment, reveling in the simple joy of human touch.

He's the captain of this team though, and he doesn't want her to worry, so he clears his throat to answer her. "Fine," he replies cordially. "Just couldn't sleep."

It's more than that (_nightmares and Bucky and war and death)_ and Steve can tell from her sharp gaze that his lie isn't fooling her at all, but he doesn't elaborate further and she lifts her hand and walks away.

He finds himself craving her touch after she leaves, the air around him feeling cold and stale in her absence. He's not in love with her or anything, god no, she's Clint's girl and he's in love with a woman that died two years ago, but it's just that he feels more human when anchored to this earth by another hand connected to another heart.

But he understands why she leaves him alone. Natasha is the Black Widow. She was probably forged from iron and winter and steel at birth. It's up to him to save himself from his demons.

With that thought, the ghosts come whispering back into his mind, and he closes his eyes, searching for respite amidst the colors on his eyelids that pool like oil on water. He sucks in a deep breath and has just managed to calm himself when he hears a soft clink and feels a figure brush past him.

Steve opens his eyes. There is a steaming mug of some dark liquid on the coffee table in front of him. Natasha is curled up on the window seat, looking towards the skyline, sipping from a glass of her own.

He reaches forwards and curls his fingers around her act of kindness. After taking a sip, he feels warmth leaking into his bloodstream, rousing him back to life. The ache in his bones seem to fade, and the nightmares begin to clear from his mind. He begins to notice the world around him: the quiet city outside the windows, the way the sky has turned a luminous white in preparation for the day.

Hazy morning sunlight filters in from the gaps in the city skyline, turning to gold everything that it touches. As the sun rises, shadows flit across the floor, the darkness on the horizon flares to life, and the infinite sky turns from bone to cream to rose to flame. Light blazes into the world and the city seems to be shattering from its brilliance, but Steve finds that Natasha is glowing brighter than any sun.

He studies her with artist's eyes. The lines of her clothing are loose and shapeless, echoing the sweeping curves of her lips and cheeks, softer than he's even seen them before. As she gazes out the huge bay windows, sunlight melts onto her face, glowing brighter as the morning ages.

She is radiating light.

He keeps this image in his mind as he paints her later, in the safety of his room. With watercolors and a slim brush, he trickles his memory back onto the paper.

He draws her saturated with color, creamy golds, blushing pinks, as if she is reflecting the dawn behind her. The woman in the painting seems to dissolve into the sky with her own rose-colored locks and a dusty peach-colored shirt. She bears an expression that reminds him of the horizon – infinite, everlasting, and eternal.

He doesn't allow a hint of black or grey to stain the paper, because the woman in his painting is not the Black Widow. She is Natasha.

She is beautiful.

He draws her filled with light.

* * *

A/N: _Please_ don't favorite/alert with reviewing, I'm sure that Cap would be quite ashamed of you if you did :)


	2. Bruce

**A/N**: For those of you who haven't heard, on Friday morning, a man shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut and killed 26 people. Twenty of them were children.

I've been watching the news for days now, and I just…it's just unfathomable. I live a thirty minute drive from Newton, and for it to hit just this close to home is just…I have friends who go to Newton High, I've driven through this town and past this school. I live in freakin' _Connecticut_, notorious for absolutely nothing. Things like this aren't supposed to happen here.

Twenty children. Twenty children who'll never get to open their Christmas presents, lose their first tooth or grow past four feet tall. Who'll never get to dance at an awkward middle school dance, giggle over their first kisses, or suffer over the pain of college applications. Who'll never get to go to college, fall in love, or have children of their own.

Every person is a child of someone else, and nobody, _nobody_ has to right to take away someone's child in an act of senseless violence. And in the end, we're all children, with our nightmares and fears and bodies that are really, nothing but flesh and a little bit of bone. This chapter, hopefully captures that.

* * *

_For Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Ana Marquez-Greene, Dylan Hockley, Madeline Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Jesse Lewis, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler, Allison Wyatt, Rachel Davino, Anne Marie Murphy, Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Soto, and Dawn Hocksprung._

_Rest easy._

* * *

He draws him after a long day.

It's late, far, far, too late, when Steve stumbles in through the door. He's weary and dirty and bruised to the bone, and he dazedly thinks to himself that he should be used to this by now, but he isn't, not at all. He misses Peggy and he hates technology and there was a little girl that he was just too late to save, and he's so, so tired of this world that claims to be his home. But he's also Captain America, so when he sees a dark figure huddled on the couch, he feels obligated to investigate.

He is so, so relieved when he sees Bruce's familiar head instead of some alien species plotting to take over the world, because God knows that at that moment, he could barely lift himself into the elevator, let alone fight off an intruder.

A thread of paternalism pierces his post-battle daze, and he walks over to the sleeping man to gently lift a pair of thin silver frames from Bruce's face. After folding them neatly, Steve places them on the coffee table within the scientist's line of sight so he'll be able to find them when he wakes.

The man looks exhausted, Steve decides, as he takes in the darkness pooling under his eyes and the lack of color in his skin. He grabs a fleece blanket from the cabinet and floats it over Bruce until it settles gently over his body. The scientist whimpers slightly before curling his body into himself, and if Steve didn't know better, he'd think that the man was nothing more than a child.

Steve's tired and filthy and covered in bruises, and logically, he knows that the only thing he should do is head straight into his bed and not move for the next seventy-two hours.

But he finds that he can't bring himself to move. Something has begun to quake within him, and that ache shivers harder when Bruce frowns slightly and sighs in his sleep, a breath that carries an ocean of pain and sorrow. Any thoughts of rest suddenly disappear from Steve's mind, and all he wants to do is scoop up the sleeping doctor and rock him in his arms, cradling him like he remembers his own mother doing, so many long years ago.

He goes into his room and instead of falling into bed, he lifts a charcoal pencil and a pad of white paper from his desk and creeps back into the living room, settling himself by Banner's side.

He sits there for a long time, lost in his work, pausing only to glance at the sleeping man every so often before turning back to the paper. Every stroke of the charcoal against the sketchpad is like a kiss against soft skin, a caress that a mother would give to her slumbering child.

The moon spills silver onto Bruce's face, and Steve, with an artist's eye, sees what lies hidden during the day. The good doctor's face is rounder in sleep, the muscles of his face slack and not held taut with worry, revealing how tensely he holds himself while he is awake. His shoulders slump forwards loosely, like a child who's lost his teddy or an old man trapped in age.

Steve sees, and draws. He sketches lightly, carefully, as if the silent movements will wake the doctor from his rest. He holds the pencil with loose, soft fingers, and with each stroke of his pencil, his own body slackens, the fight draining out of him.

As the night ticks on, the paper becomes filled with soft curves and gentle arcs that seem to uncoil themselves from the face of the man in the center of the page. Light radiates from his slumbering form before fading out to delicate shadows of charcoal grey.

There is no trace of a monster. There is only a child, sleeping through the night.

When Steve is done, he puts the sketchbook back in his room but returns to Bruce's side, all thoughts of sleep forgotten. Tonight, he'll be there to guard his dreams.

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**A/N**: Feedback is loved.


	3. Thor

A/N: Why do I have an obsession with Thor and pop-tarts? I honestly don't know, I just don't...it's strange, but I do like the way that this chapter turned out, and I hope that you'll all like it too :)

* * *

He draws him eating – what else? – pop-tarts.

After a long workout in the Stark Tower gym, Steve is craving anything with calories. He walks into the kitchen with the refrigerator as his goal when he sees what's in front of him. He stops. And stares.

Thor looks up and freezes as well, his eyes widening almost comically. He's crouching over the counter with a half-eaten pop-tart in each hand, crumbs scattered around him like sand on the Saharan and strawberry filling on his beard.

Steve opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. All he can think about is that, _oh shit_, Natasha's going to kill them both – Thor because she's restricted him from his fixation of the breakfast snack on the basis that even demigods need a somewhat balanced diet and him because no matter how much he swears that he had nothing to do with this, he knows that the Widow's going to blame him for the six empty boxes of pop-tarts littered on the floor like corpses.

So with certain doom and a painful death in his very near future, he does the only thing that he can do in this kind of a situation.

He laughs.

Thor, bless him, doesn't wait a moment before joining in. The demigod roars with laughter and sprays a cloud of crumbs into the air, which makes Steve laugh even harder, which in turn sets Thor off even more, and that's how the rest of the Avengers find them, weak and teary-eyed with hysteria, sprawled on the floor amidst a battleground of shiny silver wrappers, laughter still bursting out of them sporadically.

Steve draws the memory later that night, smiling to himself like an idiot and choking back laughter so that the other's won't hear him.

With deft strokes of an inky pen, he captures Thor's strong outline with a few bold lines, with abandon and without a fear of mistakes. Beneath the sharp nib, the demigod appears, figment by figment, piece by piece.

There comes the broad smile, wide and easy. The deeply carved crow's feet that are carved deeply into the corners of his eyes, not from age but from eons of living with laughter. The many laugh lines around his mouth that easily contain the beaming smile, as if they have long become accustomed to such an action (Steve's sure that they have).

Even though he lives caught between two worlds and has a brother who haunts his dreams, there are no shadows that fall onto the demigod's face. His portrait is strong but simple, his form starkly defined on the white paper with nothing hidden about him. He laughs freely and with joy.

Because Thor is really, the best of them all.


End file.
